Herbert Marcuse’sOne Dimensional Man (1964) remains a surgical analysis of the fundamental “irrational rationality” of our system. He argued that industrialization and mechanization could – and logically should – have led to a reduction in labor time and the institution of a post-work and post-scarcity global society after World War II. The alternative to a conscripted social reality would be one that gave us new freedom – freedom from work, freedom from propagandizing media, freedom to create and explore our own realities. The response to this deep threat to the controlling apparatus was the creation of “false needs” in the consumer, the perpetuating fear of nuclear war and terrorism, and the use of the mass media to enforce consensus consciousness. ….

Marcuse wrote: “Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change.” …

As a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Marcuse understood the sleep inducing force of indoctrination, its power to make people forget and forfeit their own real interests. “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible,” he wrote. “The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful.”